Africa and the world lose Wangari Maathai

Kenyan woman won the Nobel peace prize for environmental efforts to help the poorest

John Vidal
guardian.co.uk
Monday 26 September 2011 13.42 EDT

For a young Kikuyu girl growing up in the early 1940s, the small village of Ihithe, in the lush central highlands of Kenya, was next to perfect. There were no books or gadgets in the houses, but there were leopards and elephants in the thick forests around, clean water, rich soils, and food and work for everyone. "It was heaven. We wanted for nothing," Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel peace prize winner, who has died of cancer aged 71, told me when I saw her last in Nairobi. "Now the forests have come down, the land has been turned to commercial farming, the tea plantations keep everyone poor, and the economic system does not allow people to appreciate the beauty of where they live."

Maathai was lucky. If she had been born even a year later, she and her family would have probably been caught up in the Mau Mau uprising that raged around Ihithe, and it is unlikely that she would have got any kind of education at all. "You would see me there now: I most likely would have stayed in Ihithe, married, had children, and continued to work the land. I would not tell stories, because they have been replaced by radio, books and TV," she said.

As it was, her family sent her away to a primary school run by Italian nuns, where she excelled. But her remarkable academic rise to become the first woman to run a university department in Kenya was due entirely to her closeness to nature. It was the land that showed her and taught her everything, she said.

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